I want to share news of a large sale that was just reported to me. Silver.com was acquired on December 27, 2012 for $875,000. The buyer sent me a copy of the Escrow.com closing statement to prove the transaction was completed.

The acquiring company is JM Bullion, which was founded in 2011 and has reportedly seen tremendous growth. According to Kendall Saville, an investor in the company, Silver.com was acquired to increase momentum and drive even more business. “We decided we needed a domain name that would help us become the largest online precious metal retailers in the world and believe we have found that with Silver.com,” said Saville.

The company intends to use the same model they developed with JMBullion.com to sell gold and silver online. What better place to sell silver than on Silver.com.

Silver.com was probably one of the final sales consummated in 2012, and it will go down as one of the largest of the year. In fact, it was the third largest publicly reported sale of 2012 according to DNJournal. Congratulations to both parties, as it appears Silver.com will help a growing company.

About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest.

Thanks Elliot/Shane.
We suspended the auction as soon as we became aware that a sale had taken place. The seller of Silver.com agreed to pay the sale success fee as part of listing it for sale on Flippa.com – this is a specific checkbox rather than buried somewhere in the terms of service. We have every expectation of the seller doing the right thing here.

As a newby I’m trying to estimate the value of silver names way down the food chain based on this sale. I’m guessing good 2 word names would be valued at about -90%… roughly the $87k mark? … and downwards from there?

Neil, your thinking is all wrong.
Understandable and very common new domainers (and slow learners) but its a fallacy.

To put it most simply, regardless of ‘keyword commonality’, domains are not contingent on one another in any way. If ABC.com sells for a million dollars, it doesn’t mean that putting ABC in some other domain name makes it worth a bit of that sale.

Of course, when a category killing domain name sells for a lot of money, that’s usually a symptom the industry is lucrative and desirable domains in that niche are worth money; the catch is what “desirable” means. There are essentially no lucrative industries where the ‘better’ domain names in .com are till available, so what you see with beginning domainers who don’t understand where value comes from is dabbling in worthless extensions (not understanding the right of the dot) or worthless keyword strings (not understanding the left)

Roy happens to be right. I would not waste any money hand registering silver-related domain names right now based on this sale. I would imagine the valuable silver-related domain names have been long registered, and those that are unregistered have been passed over for a reason.

Too many people think that every domain name is worth something. There are plenty of examples of domain names that aren’t even worth the registration fee.

One solid sale may boost the value of a select few domain names, but it doesn’t have meaning for countless others. In fact, some people might think Silver.com selling for $875k isn’t actually a great sale but is a great deal for the buyer, although Platinum.com sold for $250k a few months ago: http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2012/20121003.htm

I second this. End user rules. Buyer pays premium price for a particular domain name doesn’t mean all domains with same keywords can get premium price too. Personally I think $875k is a very good price to JMBullion. I have sold several domains in low 6 figure e.g. CreditCard.net $138k. I have to admit that end user has better knowledge about the value of domain than most investors. I still own 1997 registered 24KGold.com at the moment and waiting for the right buyer.

Interest in precious metals silver investment has grown tremendously over the past 5 years. Interest in investing and holding the physical metal, as opposed to holding paper, has exploded over the past year. Silver, Gold and Platinum are the big three. Silver has the extra allure of being both a monetary metal as well as an industrial metal. What’s more interesting, IMO, is that more silver is being sold than replenished by mining and recycling. If more investors start demanding physical delivery of the metal, the price of silver will go parabolic again. This is part of the reason that bullion sellers have so much cash right now to invest and that’s why I purchased SilverExchange.com. Decent type in traffic, but killer RPM. While I wouldn’t necessarily go out and hand reg. domains, I would look very hard at bargains on the right keyword combos.

Doh! I was domain shopping at namecheap.com and went to type in the domain name: and guess who already acquired it? You did! haha j/k. I was about to purchase this domain name but realized it was taken so I figured I’d come check it out. Nice blog!

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